Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) is a widely used memory media, but is volatile. As used herein, volatile indicates that the media loses its contents when power is removed. Advances in memory technology signal that DRAM will be replaced by a media which is nonvolatile, e.g., nonvolatile memory (NVM). This change in technology has many implications and will require significant changes in computing and security systems. The union of volatile DRAM and nonvolatile hard drive disk (HDD) will be replaced by NVM, where compute memory and storage functions are instead merged into the same hardware. Memory system administration policies of the operating system and the file system policies of the storage controller are to co-exist within the persistent memory of a converged server and storage infrastructure.
Most threats to data are characterized as either physical attacks or software attacks. Physical attacks are where the threat agent can get physical access to data storage devices or computer hardware and probe the interfaces or trace execution of threads, or other ‘hands on’ analysis. Software attacks are those where the threat agent launches requests for data to the storage devices via the same interfaces that are used by authorized computing agents. In the case of either type of malicious attack on a persistent memory (PM) device, the enforcement of security for the PM device will be different than for a traditional device in which volatile memory for computing functions is separate from nonvolatile storage.